Though the HBO documentary series Addiction is not pinpointed to my interests, I have been watching because it brings together an all-star lineup of documentarians, really everybody from Pennebaker and Maysles forward, with characteristic work from Barbara Kopple (about the Steamfitters Union’s self-insured and union-run alcohol treatment program) and Berlinger & Sinofsky (about Boston Drug Court.) All of these notable filmmakers submerge their identities in the oddly configured series, which is surely destined more for DVD than broadcast. All the various stories are squeezed into a 90 minute compilation, and then offered with more completion as a supplemental series of 15-30 minute films. If the subject interests you from a personal or therapeutic standpoint, or if you might appreciate a compilation album of the finest documentarists, then this series would be worth your time. It certainly hammered home its main scientific point with me, that addiction is a disease of the brain that we are learning more and more about, and that it is amenable to treatment based on extensive experience and experiment.
Another sort of HBO series to which I made a completist commitment has just concluded, and I have to say that I was not sorry to see Rome end, even though the story cuts off with the rise of Augustus. I would put it in a category with trashy but readable historical fiction. There’s enough history and visual opulence to keep you watching, spiced with blood and sex for those who like it hot. If you go in for the ultraviolence and a bit of the old inandout, you will find it horrorshow. (Turns out the Roman past is just as brutal as the Clockwork Orange future, and twice as alien.) If you like historical reconstructions, you will find plenty to keep your eyes busy, and some to keep your mind busy as well. Dramatically it’s just a lavish soap opera, with villains and villainesses, shocking revelations, broad emotions, and sex-sex-sex -- not that that’s a bad thing, you understand.
For different reasons, I had occasion to look at two recent cinematic spectacles that met with lukewarm critical receptions, and I found myself sharing the averaged reaction represented by their cumulative Metacritic scores, giving both a *5+*. I watched Idlewild (2006, dvd, n.) because it was strongly recommended by one of the critics I trust most, Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com. (I think our disagreements must be confined to musicals, since I remember her disparaging one I liked a lot, Gurinder Chadha’s faux-Bollywood Bride & Prejudice.) Anyway, when it comes to OutKast, I’m an outcast -- never heard a song of theirs, didn’t recognize them as the stars of this film -- so I’m out of it from the get-go. Even if I bought into Bryan Barber’s hyperkinetic vision of a 1930s speakeasy in Idlewild, Georgia, once the music started and the singers started rapping, I was distanced from the proceedings in a way I wasn’t by the anachronism of, say, Marie Antoinette. (MC-55.)
Though I’d enjoyed the book, poor reviews kept me from Rob Marshall’s adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha. (2005, dvd, n.) There was something just so Hollywood in the way the movie had three Chinese actresses playing Japanese geishas speaking English -- that sort of cultural “whatever” smacked of the old days of painted movie illusion. But on the other hand, those three Chinese actresses were Gong Li, Ziyi Zhang, and Michelle Yeoh, so that’s some serious star power to go with dazzling beauty. Which of course the film ladles on in a big way. So the eye candy is certainly sufficient to make this a watchable experience, as obvious and inert as the film may be dramatically. (MC-54.)
A different sort of spectacle is on view in Rize (2005, dvd, n.), a rap musical I could get behind, about a form of rapid, even violent, but artful street dance indigenous to the mean streets of L.A., various strains of which convey a different sort of communal identity from Crips and Bloods. This is the first documentary from David LaChapelle, apparently known for his fashion photography and music videos. That background comes through in the disjointed quality of the film, watchable in its moments but not cumulative in its impact. This is no Paris Is Burning, the marvelous and deeply moving 1990 documentary about the vogue for vogueing among a community of transvestites in NYC. It’s less a journey than a gyration, but it does give voice to lives less noticed. *6* (MC-74.)
One last note before I’m away for a week: if you are partial to spectacular nature documentaries, I advise you to tune into the series Planet Earth on the Discovery Channel or on DVD. It represents the state of the art -- awesome in the truest sense of the word.
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